Moron o' the day
Today's moron is Heidi Cullen, a "climatologist" who makes here living hosting a program on The Weather Channel called "The Climate Code." Ms. Cullen has a vested interest in human-generated global warming, because otherwise she'd be reporting the weather in Boise, Idaho.
Ms. Cullen has made a name for herself of late by calling for the American Meteorological Society to pull accreditation for your local television weather guy/gal if he or she doesn't pay homage to the belief that humans are casuing global warming.
That's silly, but it doesn't arise to the high standards to which we here at Hoystory like to hold our Moron o' the day. No, it's this statement that wins Ms. Cullen the award.
"It's like allowing a meteorologist to go on-air and say that hurricanes rotate clockwise and tsunamis are caused by the weather," she wrote in her internet blog. "It's not a political statement... it's just an incorrect statement."
The storms that are called hurricanes in the northern hemisphere do rotate clockwise, when they're in the southern hemisphere.
It's called the Coriolis effect.
Ms. Heidi Cullen -- Moron o' the day.
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Very true and fun observations about the Coriolis force. 😉
Apparently Dr. Cullen doesn't realize that Jim Cantore and Stephanie Abrams, known hurricane chasers, pay the bills at TWC. May she find out the hard way.
I've seen a little of her vitae. Compared to her undergrad and masters degree, what in the world did she study and what was her dissertation to become whatever her PhD is. (It's not obvious to me what her PhD was awarded in. Does anyone have access to this info?)
Her undergrad was in operations research, i.e. math for modeling and analysis of complex systems (a useful foundation for climate modeling). Her PhD was in climatology:
Dr. Cullen most recently was a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. She has done research in the U.S. Southwest and the Middle East, publishing on domestic and international climate topics.
As a post-doc, she received a NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellowship and spent two years working at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction. She received a B.S. in Engineering/Operations Research from Columbia University in NYC and went on to receive a Ph.D. in climatology and ocean-atmosphere dynamics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Her dissertation focused on trying to understand the impacts and dynamics of the North Atlantic Oscillation, an important climate influence.